NEW YORK CITY—The Epoch Times on Oct. 7 received an envelope containing a white powder that appears meant to intimidate the publication.
The yellow-colored envelope contained an Epoch Times newspaper and a small clear ziploc bag containing a white powder. The Epoch Times alerted the New York Police Department, which took the items for testing. Results of the investigation are pending. Federal authorities were also notified.
The envelope bore official Chinese postal markings indicating it either originated from China or was returned from China—at the same time that pro-Beijing actors have stepped up their campaign to target and threaten The Epoch Times.
In recent months, Chinese threat actors have been sending threat emails en masse to various government and civil agencies in the United States and worldwide, impersonating Epoch Times email addresses and staff.
Over the past week, Chinese actors have also created fake social media accounts to impersonate senior personnel from The Epoch Times in what appears to be a widening cyber campaign against the publication.
One such account spammed a YouTube channel with violent messages. The user, using the name and profile of Huang Wanqing, editor-in-chief of the Chinese-language edition of Epoch Times, repeatedly stated a plan to crash into people in front of Taiwan’s Presidential Office Building and open fire.
“The comments immediately caught my eye because this is someone I know,” political affairs commentator and YouTube channel owner Chen Weiyu told The Epoch Times. “I knew he couldn’t possibly have sent them, so this is definitely fake.”
Chen responded to the comments, urging her subscribers to report the impersonator. That same day, she received an email showing she had also been impersonated.
“They are getting increasingly belligerent,” she said. “They think that they are untouchable. It’s as if they are above the law.”
This appears to be the sentiment the cyberactors were trying to convey.
In recent weeks, operatives have also been sending screenshots to The Epoch Times revealing threatening messages they have purportedly distributed.
“What can you do with me?” reads one email from Oct. 5. Attached is a screenshot showing a White House contact form filled out with The Epoch Times’ contact email and phone number.
Other affected agencies include the CIA, the Justice Department, the FBI, the National Park Service, the Kennedy Center, various state and public entities in Taiwan, the UK, the Czech Republic, and others.
An email sent on Oct. 7 came with a photo of a hand victory sign in front of a Chinese flag. One from a day later states that while the sender believes “while judging on the current circumstances, the Chinese Communist Party has a near-zero chance to win,” they are throwing their lot in with it.
“In every dynasty and generation there are people like me, and in this era I’m playing this role,” the Oct. 8 email reads, adding that they are “all in.”
“Fortune is sought through danger,” it continued.
The Epoch Times rebuked the intimidation campaign.
“The Epoch Times strongly condemns this intimidation campaign by the Chinese Communist Party,” Jasper Fakkert, the chief editor for The Epoch Times’ Chinese language edition, said in a statement. “We will not be intimidated and will continue our mission to provide truthful and uncensored information to people around the world, including in China.”
The goal of the operation is to impose psychological pressure, according to Casey Fleming of BlackOps Partners, a Washington-based cybersecurity consulting firm.
“It’s all meant to intimidate and scare,” he told The Epoch Times, describing these actions as part of an “unrestricted war” that the Chinese regime has long waged to “weaken your enemy from within.”
“Just the existence of an organization that has refuted CCP rule embarrasses them and weakens their power over the Chinese people as well as the rest of the world,” he added. “They have to eliminate that embarrassment right now.”
In the backdrop of this operation is an intensifying effort by the Chinese regime to stifle a particular faith group worldwide.
In late 2022, Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally gave the directive in a secret meeting to zero in on companies founded by practitioners of Falun Gong.
The spiritual discipline, based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, attracted an estimated 70 million to 100 million following in the 1990s in China, but has since been subject to a brutal state-directed persecution.
Since 1999, untold numbers of practitioners have suffered arbitrary detention, forced labor, torture, and even death by forced organ harvesting.
The Epoch Times was started in 2000 in Atlanta by Falun Gong practitioners who had fled persecution in China. Their goal was to bring heavily censored information out of China and expose the CCP’s atrocities against tens of millions of people that were going largely unreported. The regime arrested dozens of the publication’s early contributors in China, sentencing several to up to 10 years in prison.
According to a political insider, Xi was particularly frustrated with officials’ failure to prevent The Epoch Times, along with its sister media NTD, from growing into one of the main platforms for exposing the CCP’s crimes.
In 2025, the Justice Department confirmed several Beijing-directed cyberespionage attempts targeting The Epoch Times. According to a federal indictment, state-backed hackers compromised email accounts of the newspaper’s chief editor and a vice president in one May 2017 scheme.
The cyberattackers have taken credit for several other campaigns, including fake bomb threats to New York libraries in April. The threats, appearing on the eve of a major Falun Gong anniversary, caused at least one evacuation.
Shen Yun Performing Arts is another prominent target. Founded by Falun Gong practitioners in New York, the arts group undertakes an annual world tour to showcase “China before communism,” with some segments depicting ongoing abuses by the CCP. Eminent venues around the world have received intimidation threats ahead of scheduled performances. The perpetrators usually demand the show be canceled and threaten potential violent retaliation.
A preliminary analysis from an outside analyst traced some of the threatening emails to China’s northwestern Shaanxi province. Taiwan’s authorities, while investigating the threats against Shen Yun, have previously identified Xi’an, the capital of the province, as the possible city where the emails originated.
Huang, the chief editor for The Epoch Times’ Chinese language edition, said the actions bear the marks of a coordinated campaign.
“This is part of the CCP’s transnational repression,” he said in a statement. “It’s a systematic impersonation operation, and the goal is to create terror and chaos.”
Fleming echoed the assessment.
“It’s what it is. It’s terrorism.”
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